The solution to North Korea

The North Korean regime is all-or-nothing. You can’t worship Kim Il Sung (President for Eternity) just a little. The leaders are either in power or they are dead. Neither of its immediate neighbors wants the regime to collapse, fearing a flood of starving refugees more than they fear an all-out attack. It is difficult to know what the best policy toward such a state should be, Seoul being only an artillery barrage away from it.

Perhaps we should offer the 1,000 highest people in the hierarchy (and their families) a golden asylum in Estoril, Rome, and France in general—the resorts of deposed European monarchs such as King Zog of Albania—and promise China and South Korea to share out evenly whatever refugees the collapse of the regime would result in. The Koreans are just the kind of immigrants Europe needs: hardworking, docile, intelligent, capable, and probably immunized against ideology by their long experience of it. They would be bewildered at first, but would soon find their feet and become an asset to their new countries.

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It's so hard to say if they are "immunized against ideology" or if they've swallowed it. They engage in public displays of ideology that are fevered in intensity, but of course that's a way of winning the favor of the powerful in their society. Is it cynical? Or is it Stockholm Syndrome?

My greatest fear for the North Korean people is that I expect there will mass suicides when their regime finally collapses. Not out of sadness for the loss of the Great Reader, but because their entire worldview will be destroyed. These people have lived, isolated from the outside world, for over 60 years, and those who could possible recall a time when the Il Dynasty did not rule would mostly recall the horrible years under Japanese occupation. So to them, there has never been a better world to live in. Ever. And while I am sure they know on some level that the claims of their government are barely polished lies (you can only eat so much grass while hearing about bumper crops year after year and not recognize that they might not be telling you the truth), they can honestly have no idea how much worse off they are than the rest of the world. The psychological trauma when that day comes will likely be devastating.

Now, I expect the first response will be brutal retribution against those who have oppressed them, but after that, I worry that the shock of how wildly reality differs from what they know to be unbearable. What has been done to those people is simply vile.

Even in Iraq, which was semi-socialist under Saddam, the farmers were accustomed to waiting for instructions from the government -- as well as supplies for their farms. Everything from seeds to the crops they would be planting that year was thought out for them by some government agent, and so they weren't really equipped mentally to run the farm as a business. Our Civil Affairs / CMO guys were constantly trying to give them the knowledge they need, but they didn't really even want it -- they wanted someone to step up and provide them with seeds and instructions like always before.

My greatest fear for the North Korean people is that I expect there will mass suicides when their regime finally collapses. Not out of sadness for the loss of the Great Reader, but because their entire worldview will be destroyed.

I've thought about quite a number of horrifying results, but not this one for some reason, and I think you're right.

Grim, my husband has relayed similar stories (not out of his personal experience, but percolating back through other Marines).

On a far less compelling scale, I can remember both of us struggling for a year or so after he retired with the notion that for the first time in decades, we could move any time we wanted to, quit our jobs, etc. :p

Our Civil Affairs / CMO guys were constantly trying to give them the knowledge they need, but they didn't really even want it -- they wanted someone to step up and provide them with seeds and instructions like always before.

Which is why the Japanese preferred to get the Okinawan kids while they were young and begin language education/indoctrination.

Culture is passed on in the young, the children, not in the often rigidly obedient adults. The adults are often an obstruction to progress, because it takes them so very long to accept the necessary solutions, if that runs counter to their upbringing and conditioning.

The Ottomans with their castrated boy slave battalions and the Leftists in the US indoctrinating children even in 1930s, learned that lesson very well. Even if the host civs have forgotten them.